A friend of mine put my attention to this blog post [1]. I didn't read
it as it is too late now (I just heard friend's description of the
article), but I think that there is no sense to wait tomorrow for
sharing it. The issue is important enough to be analyzed.
[1] - http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway
geni writes:
>>> It is also a opportunity to further annoy our readers. IT's pretty
>>> clear they don't like it
>>
>> and you know this because...?
>
> Because I run daily searches of blogs for the term wikipedia. Because
> complaints have turned up all over the place on wikipedia. Because or
> editors who also have to read the thing have gone so far as to have a
> gadget to get rid of it. Because adblock which targets banner ads
> among other things has 10,850,228 dowloads.
>
> Because people come to wikipedia to read articles rather than thankyou
> messages and taking up significant significant screen space with stuff
> readers don't want is not generally considered a way to maximize the
> level of like for your site.
No could dispute that some people dislike the donation-solicitation
banner or that some people complain about it.
But it seems worth underscoring here that we can't categorically say
that everyone -- or even a majority of users -- are troubled by it to
any great degree. The people who are untroubled by it are the ones
who don't bother (a) to complain about it on their blogs or (b) to
engage with those who complain about it on Wikipedia.
This is not a dismissal of anyone's complaints about the manner of the
solicitation of donations on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Quite possibly
we could do things better, and we will certainly try to. But it's a
classic instance of sampling error to assume that the complaints are
necessarily representative of the community of Wikimedians or the
communities served by the projects.
(Confession: In another life I was a student of statistics and
polling.)
--Mike
It seems that the pictures from German Federal Archive have been detected by
the search engine of Wikimedia Commons. So now you can find more easily
pictures that have not been categorized by now. Every picture has an
original description in German.
To find pictures from the history of your country, I suggest searching
simply by the German name of the country (with "Search", not "Go"). I have
tried out some (sometimes adding "Bundesarchiv" to the search), and nearly
always I got some pics of politicians from that country visiting Germany, or
vice versa, or German soldiers in WWI or II, or a picture of a head of state
for a German magazine etc. Or you can search the name of a person; so I
could just add a picture to [[nl:Bernhard van Lippe-Biesterfeld]].
Ziko
--
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde
Some of these issues have already been mentioned on this list recently,
but I wanted to summarize the items on our agenda for the board meeting
this weekend, Jan. 9-11, in San Francisco. These include:
*a recap of the fundraiser (this will obviously be very preliminary,
since the "thank you" portion is still running)
*more generally, a review of the overall financial situation
*review of the various existing committee structures
*the proposed process for discussing and voting on migration from GFDL
to CC-BY-SA
*preliminary discussions on developing a long-term plan for the organization
*steps toward filling the remaining appointed board seats, including
meeting with candidates
As usual, there will also be miscellaneous housekeeping matters like new
chapters, but those are the main topics. The committee system ties into
the question of the ombudsman commission as I mentioned before, but
that's just one example. In general, you could say we're looking to make
changes that will rationalize the system with how the foundation
actually works. Things that currently work well we would likely leave
mostly alone, but there will probably be changes where things aren't
working.
Some of you may be wondering about the long-term plan and what that will
entail. I don't have a lot of specifics right now because we're just at
the beginning stage, but I thought it was important to have this
initiative start out with the board. But I also intend for this to
develop by involving the broader community - editors, staff, supporters,
interested observers - so a plan will itself take some time, and there
will be many opportunities for input. And for some of the considerations
we will no doubt look at in planning, I'm sure you could find ideas in
some of the thoughts Florence occasionally sent out while she was chair.
The license migration will be up for discussion in the very near future.
You might consider that process a trial run for what we hope to do in
working with the community during the planning process. I definitely
encourage people to think carefully about these issues and get involved
in the discussion.
--Michael Snow
Hello.
I'd like to know how migration to CC-BY-SA will be done.
1. Which one will discussion (or vote) for migration to CC-BY-SA be held,
globally, or locally?
2. If vote will be held globally, when will vote start?
Please answer the above questions. Thank you.
--
김우진
Woojin Kim
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Huji <huji.huji(a)gmail.com>
To: translators-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 15:23:22 +0330
Subject: Re: [Translators-l] New Privacy Policy
Dear translators, and dear foundation members,
I was just translating the new version of privacy policy to Persian, and I
noted that there is a wrong sentence in the privacy policy text. It says:
"If one saves a user name or password in one's browser, that information
will be saved for up to 30 days, and this information will be resent to the
server on every visit to the same Project."
The second part of the sentence, and the description about the 30 day
life-time, clarifies that the intent of the writers was to say that "if one
marks the checkbox in the login form to stay logged in". The phrase "if one
saves a user name or password in one's browser" (letting alone the incorrect
dictation of "username") is irrelevant; saving password "in one's browser"
is not limited to 30 days and has nothing to do with the logged-in cookies.
It would be great if the sentence was corrected as soon as possible as many
languages have not translated the new privacy policy yet.
Cheers,
Hojjat (aka Huji)
PS: I'm not subscribed to foundation-l; in case you think I'm missing a
discussion there, please let me know.
On 1/5/09, Woojin Kim <kwj2772(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Privacy policy has been revised.
>
> You can help translating updated version in Meta<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy>
> .
>
> Thank you.
>
> --
> 김우진
> Woojin Kim
>
> _______________________________________________
> Translators-l mailing list
> Translators-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/translators-l
>
>
--
Michael Bimmler
mbimmler(a)gmail.com
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Hello everyone!
Cross posting this to several lists, forgive me if you get it a number
of times.
Wikimania 2009 requires will be requiring a number of volunteers to
handle the scholarship applications. Details of the Volunteer
commitments are at
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Volunteering:Wikimania_scholarship_revi…>
and
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Volunteering:Wikimania_scholarship_tech…>
Any questions may be presented to me directly at my email address.
Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
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Creating a universal online language should include cross references like music and photography.
Is it possible to provide links within wiki pages written in moribund languages to established blog topics within whichever given country the user wishes to view?
New wikistats reports have been published today, for the first time since
May 2008. The reports have been generated on the new wikistats server
Bayes, which is operational since a few weeks. The dump process itself had
been restarted some weeks earlier, new dumps are now available for all 700+
wiki projects (with the English Wikipedia as the usual exception). From now
on the wikistats reports will be updated much more frequently. The actual
processing of any new dump starts soon after the dump becomes available,
results will be stored in intermediate files. Once a week updated reports
will be published.
Much more on this at http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/12/wikistats-is-back/
Happy holidays everyone.
Erik Zachte